Fashionable fleece
Trees get all the headlines, but sheep actually sequester carbon, too. Much maligned for belching methane, sheep are partially self-offsetting. For the lifespan of wool, it draws carbon from the air and locks it up, surrendering it only when it biodegrades.
And as it has among the longest lifespans of any common fabric, wool is a hero story New Zealand can proudly tell.
AgResearch textile technologist Stewart Collie is helping research a complete life-cycle assessment of wool in tandem with Australian Wool Innovation and says that, so far, it appears wool has a significant and measurable advantage over most other fabrics, especially in the “in-use” and “end-of-life” stages. It stays in your wardrobe for a lot longer, biodegrades and its fibres cause no harm.
Like hair, it’s made of the protein keratin and has surface lipids that repel water and resist stains. The crimp in the fibre insulates and also keeps you cooler in hot weather. Sweat into wool and it’ll absorb and release it.
Wool’s natural chemical compounds trap odour molecules – washing or even just airing it will release them. Collie says it also takes a lot less water and soap to get it clean, but “it’s a bit susceptible to UV degradation, so it’s best not to put it in direct sun”.
Wool not only has a near-blameless life but a laudable death. Research so far suggests the microfibres biodegrade in sea water and are probably harmless to ocean creatures. Keratin-digesting microbes are rare, but they obviously exist and do their stuff as all animal products (unless fossilised) disappear over time. “That gives wool a big advantage as a fabric,” says Collie.
Yet another sheep tick: wool garments tend to be kept for a long time, as the fabric lends itself more to classic garments than fleeting fads. the environment. Among her suppliers are a South Island merino farm, her sustainability chief Claire Bergkamp declaring its “happy sheep produce better wool”.
McCartney hasn’t just made a difference to her own bank account and conscience. Thomas reports that her campaign to discourage the wood-cellulose product rayon being produced from ancient or endangered rainforest has prompted all but one of the 10 wood-rayon producers to stop that logging.
She caused further ructions by beaming light on the reason the once prohibitively costly cashmere had become so affordable by the 1990s. Mongolia’s economic deregulation had brought a massive intensification in goat farming, displacing vast tracts of environmentally precious grassland into desert. Soft against the skin, tough against the planet.
Throwaway fashion has revolted other couturiers, notably the opulence-prone Jean Paul Gaultier. He became so sickened by it, he quit the ready-to-wear sector, saying, “We’re making clothes that aren’t destined to be worn. Too many clothes kills clothes.”
THE NEED FOR SPEED
Thomas says there’s growing optimism that the green-motivated rise in secondhand clothing could be a life raft for the disappearing high street, as well as a further cue for fast fashion to cool its jets. British online thrift store ThredUp has estimated that, by 2028, the used market will be worth more than fast fashion. More retailers are accepting their clothes back for mending or resale, and physical retailers are beginning to give used clothing space on the shop floor. ThredUp further projects that extending the life or wear of a piece of clothing by just nine months can mitigate its carbon footprint by 30%.
In the US, it’s been calculated that keeping clothing for an extra three months would reduce the national carbon, water and waste footprints by 5-10%. The recycling of two million tonnes of clothing a year equates to taking one million cars from US streets.
The generally accepted global estimate is that, on average, 85% of clothing bought each year is dumped or burnt. We’re buying 60% more clothing, but keeping it for half as long. New Zealand is a slower fast-fashion consumer than many. Our discarded duds comprise 4% of our landfill. For Americans, it’s 7%.
But Global Fashion Agenda predicts apparel consumption will rise 63% to 102 million tonnes by 2030 if trends continue.
How did we achieve this accelerating blur of cheap clobber? Brands such as Benetton, Zara and H&M have refined the market to an intensively responsive global supply chain, enabled by digital reach and increased automation, known as “quick response”. Previously, fashion labels worked nearly a year ahead, designing, sourcing fabric and contracting – usually to Asia, the cheapest location for garment manufacturing – and hoping they’d picked the seasonal trends correctly when, months later, they hit the shops. Quick response, pioneered largely by Spain’s Zara brand, meant they could instead intensively focus-group the designs and remotely order smaller but more frequent batches from Asian factories. That, and make cheap knock-offs of couture designs. An imitation celebrity or royal frock can even be ordered online the day after its first appearance. Instead of a six- to ninemonth cycle, fashion can now be a five- or six-week cycle. Keeping those pre-tested designs coming gave shoppers more choice of ever-cheaper clothing while reducing the risk of unsold inventory. This generated explosive profits. Fast-delivery online pioneers such as ASOS and Boohoo kicked things up another notch.
This in turn drove and accelerated new “efficiencies” all down the supply chain, perhaps the most profound being in cotton growing. When cotton
The generally accepted global estimate is that, on average, 85% of clothing bought each year is dumped or burnt.
first powered the Industrial Revolution, it was not a thirsty plant. The fabric in a $5 T-shirt would have required the amount of water it takes to make a cup of tea, compared with the litres it soaks up today.
As a grower explains to a shocked Thomas in Fashionopolis, cotton is a naturally rampant perennial that “wants” to become a tree. The way to make it produce its magic puffballs, instead, is to stress it by disrupting its growth.
In the 1980s, Germany-based European chemical company BASF developed a new growth-regulating chemical that turned the poor-soil perennial into an annual – but with several times the productivity per hectare.
By the late 1990s, Monsanto had inserted itself firmly into the supply chain, too, with its genetically modified Roundup Ready cotton, meaning farmers could kill weeds with Monsanto’s glyphosate herbicide without it affecting the crop. This was a labour-saving boon. The new cotton was more attractive to insects, so Bayer’s aldicarb insecticide became comparably indispensable. The fast-fashion and chemical multinationals were thus interlinked in a mutually beneficial partnership that, although we now know it to be environmentally disastrous on many levels – herbicides and insecticides have been increasingly fingered as carcinogens, watertable pollutants and pollinator inhibitors – will be hard to break. “We’ve made cotton this greedy monster,” Thomas says, “and it doesn’t have to be.”
Organic, old-fashioned, rough-as-guts cotton plants can be farmed sustainably, but the resultant fabric is much more expensive.
Thomas says perhaps the toughest mission in the campaign against fast fashion is to persuade consumers of the virtue of expensive clothing – much costlier and in less quantity.
THE ILLUSION OF AFORDABILITY
In New Zealand, where decades of heavy import control meant clothing was so expensive for most of the past century that many families had to save or budget for it, this is a hard sell. Even this month, economist Shamubeel Eaqub was lauding the affordability of clothing.
But affordability, says Thomas, is a dangerous illusion. Even discounting the disgraceful and chronic underpayment of garment workers worldwide, the environmental and resource cost is demonstrably unaffordable, she says.
“I keep hearing this view that, ‘I can’t afford to pay more for clothing.’ Well, yes, you can. If you look at the price of petrol, of food, of most things over the past few decades, and then compare what’s happened to clothes, it’s just a complete distortion.”
Fewer people sew, so fewer people have any idea how much work goes in to making a garment, let alone the invisible supply change depredations, which “afford” us these cheap, plentiful garments.
“Even jeans, the ultimate sustainable garment, made in durable fabric and riveted to last, have become a prime example of unsustainable clothing,” Thomas says. Jeans production requires nearly 38,000 litres of water per garment – nearly 7000 for the cotton, the rest for dyeing, washing and “distressing”. The synthetic indigo dye – much cheaper and less of a faff than sustainable plant indigo – contains 10 chemicals, including cyanide and formaldehyde.
“I’m not a socialist or a Marxist, and I love clothes. I’ve been covering the fashion industry for 30 years, and even I have been shocked by what I’ve found in researching this book. It’s greed. It’s unbridled capitalism and unchecked globalism, and it’s just so out of kilter,” Thomas says.
Like so many other businesses, fast fashion has ignored the evidence from the 2008 global financial crisis – that chasing everbigger profits is commercially unsustainable. But that is because the fashion industry has proven that behaving unsustainably is sustainable.
A further contribution has been some trade deals, notably the North American Free Trade Agreement between the US, Canada and Mexico that takes no account of labour conditions and environmental effects. Thomas says the European Union’s stewardship, and sustainability and workforce provisions now built into more free-trade deals, can make a huge difference to curbing fashion’s rapacity. She’s also bullish about governmental moves towards curbing fast fashion through tax and regulation.
But Fashionopolis sharpens the impression that the definitive sustainable hemline will be reached only when it becomes antisocial to produce and buy multiple garments and quite unthinkable to throw them away after a few wears.
Price-point revision needs a massive social nudge, to the point where shoppers accept that, say, $80 is a fair price for a cotton T-shirt; or $180 for organic linen pants; even $280 for a beautiful organic cotton shirt.
“If we pay people what they’re worth, only source from sustainable fabrics and make beautiful fashion, we can keep our garments forever.”
“I’ve been covering the fashion industry for 30 years and even I have been shocked by what I’ve found. It’s greed. It’s unchecked globalism.”